News:

Happy Towel Day!!! Don't forget to carry your towel with you everywhere (yes, everywhere) you go on May 25th. If you have a camera, snap a few photos of you and your towel, then share them with us on the "Towel Day Pictures" board. If you don't have a camera, just borrow one from a strag. After all, the strag will happily lend you, the hitchhiker, a camera or a dozen other items that you might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that anyone who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly someone to be reckoned with.Click on the banner for instructions on how to put this banner on your web site or signature.

Author
Topic: A (Vogon?) Poem of Mine (Read 3801 times)

Alright, I guess I'll go ahead and post this. It's a poem I wrote perhaps a couple of years ago, one of the only poems I have ever written at all, and the only one of mine I've ever liked. I'm posting it here because it does contain a sneaky Hitchhiker reference--each stanza has a total of 42 syllables in it (three lines of 8 followed by two lines of 9). Although the theme is unrequited love, the surface context is based on a location in the Pokemon Ruby and Pokemon Sapphire video games, called Mirage Island. To make a long story short, Mirage Island is a location in the games that is almost, but not quite completely impossible to get to; whether or not the path is open is determined by a lottery in the game's programming that the player cannot have any active effect on. The thing is, there's almost nothing on Mirage Island--just a type of Pokemon that you can get elsewhere, and a sort of collectible item; the collectible item is one-of-a-kind, but the Pokemon series has so many one-of-a-kind collectible items that it's completely meaningless. Mirage Island is just one of many things that fuel my hatred for the Ruby and Sapphire versions of Pokemon, a hatred that is almost as intense as my love for the Gold and Silver versions of the same series. I've thought for a long time that Mirage Island is the perfect metaphor for the meaning of life--you're supposed to be searching for it, but if you ever actually found it, it would be completely meaningless. Somewhat similar to Hitchhiker's 42 theme. In order to find out whether or not Mirage Island is accessible (it opens up for a 24-hour period whenever you win the invisible lottery), you, the player, talk to an old man in a particular house in a seaside town; if Mirage Island is not accessible, he will remark, "I can't see Mirage Island today..." This nine-syllable phrase sparked my idea for the poem, although I was also "inspired" by certain personal emotions at the time--and I think poetry must be inspired by emotion, rather than ideas, to turn out good.

Mirage Island

Adrift at sea, my mind drifts too.Sometimes I can't not think of you.But does it matter if I do?I know the answer; you needn't say.I'll talk about something else, okay?

The sea is home, or so they claim,To something I find rather lame:An Island, and Mirage's the name.I'll tell you what the problem is, eh?Mirage is the needle in the hay.

Although, in truth, I must admit,The part that really makes me fit:It's just a needle, and that's it.Once you find it (you won't anyway),All you get is a "Yo!" and a "Hey!"

And here's what really bugs me, now:I drift in order to find howTo get no more than "Hey" and "Wow,"When I could just sail back to your bay.As if I don't know the freaking way.

Mirage, if found, really won't care.I found you; I remember where,But you prefer to remain there.So what else can I possibly say?I can't see Mirage Island today.

Logged

". . . We realised we had been myopically shortsighted to think this thing was just an adding machine. . . . So we began to develop it as a super typewriter. With a long and increasingly incomprehensible feature list. Users of Microsoft Word will know what I'm talking about."